‘Secret police’ chasing information leakers at Facebook: Report

San Francisco, March 17: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has reportedly deployed “secret police” to catch and punish information leakers at his company.

According to a report in The Guardian, an unnamed employee was called to a meeting in 2017 under the guise of a promotion. However, he found himself face to face with the secretive “rat-catching” team led by Sonya Ahuja, the company’s head of investigations.

The team had records of screenshots he had taken, links he had clicked or hovered over.

The “secret police” also accessed chats between him and a journalist dating back to before he joined the company.

“It’s horrifying how much they know. You go into Facebook and it has this warm, fuzzy feeling of ‘we’re changing the world’ and ‘we care about things’.

“But you get on their bad side and all of a sudden you are face to face with [Facebook CEO] Mark Zuckerberg’s secret police,” the employee told The Guardian.

According to the report, Zuckerberg hosts weekly meetings where he shares details of unreleased new products and strategies in front of thousands of employees.

“When you first get to Facebook you are shocked at the level of transparency. You are trusted with a lot of stuff you don’t need access to,” the employee was quoted as saying.

During one of Zuckerberg’s weekly meetings in 2015, said the report, he had warned employees: “We’re going to find the leaker, and we’re going to fire them.”

According to a Facebook spokesperson, “companies routinely use business records in workplace investigations, and we are no exception”.

Not just Facebook, James Damore, the software engineer who was fired from Google after writing a controversial anti-diversity memo, “suspects he was being monitored by the company during his final days”.

James Damore stopped using his personal Gmail account after being fired, said the report.

New Delhi, Nov 19 (IANS) The Delhi High Court on Tuesday allowed the Unique Identification Authority of India’s (UIDAI) plea seeking more time to file a response on a plea seeking exemplary damages for the losses caused due to leakage of Aadhaar data.

A bench of Justice S. Ravindra Bhat and Justice Prateek Jalan listed the matter for February 14 for further hearing.

The court was hearing a plea filed by Shamnad Basheer through advocate Siddharth Aggarwal alleging that the dissemination of personal information of Aadhaar holders made it clear that the government is responsible for any breach of right to informational privacy.

The petitioner has said his Constitutional rights have been violated due to the negligence of UIDAI.

Citing the top court’s judgement, the petitioner said that when the state violates the Constitutional rights of a citizen, courts may award compensation.

He also said that his petition is very different from the other proceedings in the Supreme Court as he is seeking claim to damages due to breach of data.

Basheer has also requested the court to appoint an independent committee comprising multiple experts to investigate the scope, extent of breaches and the magnitude of harm caused due to data leak.

He has also sought direction to release information on the number of data breaches which have taken place since the inception of the Aadhaar and the steps taken by the government towards remedying and rectifying their security practices after the breaches.

Google best Search engine, we keep Safari safe: Tim Cook

San Francisco, Nov 19: Google Search engine — the default platform for iOS users — is the best, Apple CEO Tim Cook has said, adding that the company has put proper controls in its Safari web browser to safeguard users’ data.

In an interview with Axios on HBO on Sunday night, Cook defended Apple’s billion-dollar deal with Google that keeps Google Search a default search platform on its devices.

“One, I think their (Google’s) Search engine is the best. But two, look at what we’ve done with the controls. We have private web browsing, we have intelligent tracking prevention.

“What we’ve tried to do is come up with ways to help our users through their course of the day. It’s not a perfect thing, but it goes a long way in helping,” Cool told the Axios technology correspondent.

Google will reportedly pay Apple a whopping $9 billion in 2018 to remain the default search engine for iPhone’s Safari browser on iOS.

According to Goldman Sachs analyst Rod Hall (via Business Insider), this number would only continue to grow, potentially leading to a payment of $12 billion in 2019.

Cook has opposed privacy practices of some big tech companies, like Facebook, in the past, calling them a form of “surveillance”.

When it comes to regulating the tech companies, Cook said while he was “not a big fan of regulation,” but there comes time to “admit when the free market is not working”.

“I think it’s inevitable that there will be some level of regulation. I think Congress and the administration at some point will pass something,” Cook said.

“This is not a matter of privacy versus profits, or privacy versus technical innovation. That’s a false choice.

“Your device has incredible intelligence about you, but as a company I don’t have to have that,” the Apple CEO added.

On a question on diversity at workplace, Cook said the Silicon Valley has been open to many different people from different walks of life.

“But I agree 100 per cent from a gender point of view that the valley has missed it and tech in general has missed it,” he said.

India among top 4 countries targeted for phishing attacks

New Delhi, Nov 19: India is among the top four nations targeted by phishing attacks, a new report said on Monday, adding that the country is also among the top hosting countries for such online frauds, second only to the US.

The other three countries most targeted by phishing are Canada, the US and the Netherlands, showed research from RSA Security, a Dell Technologies business that offers business-driven security solutions.

Phishing is the fraudulent attempt to obtain sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details via email.

Phishing attacks accounted for 50 per cent of all observed fraud attacks in the third quarter of 2018, claimed the “RSA Quarterly Fraud Report” for the Q3 2018.

In the third quarter, RSA detected 38,196 total fraud attacks worldwide. The overall phishing volume in Q3 increased 70 per cent from Q2.

However, attacks involving financial malware dropped from 16 per cent last quarter to 12 per cent in Q3.

“Phishing and malware-based attacks are the most prolific online fraud tactics developed over the past decade.

“Phishing attacks not only enable online financial fraud but these sneaky threats chip away at our sense of security as they get better at mimicking legitimate links, messages, accounts, individuals and sites,” the report said.

Automated fraud comes in the form of the various active banking Trojan horse malware families. These malicious programmes do their work quietly and often without detection until it is too late.

Fraud from mobile browsers and mobile applications increased in Q3 of this year and represented 73 per cent of total fraud transactions, said the report, adding that tear over year, fraud from mobile applications increased 27 per cent

RSA said it recovered nearly 5.5 million unique compromised credit cards in Q3, an eight per cent increase from the previous quarter.